Bulimia has only recently been acknowledged as a specific eating disorder leading to serious medical complications. Little is known of its etiology or of effective approaches to treatment. One study has found bulimia to be related to affective illness on the basis of family history and of response to the dexamethasone suppression test (DST) (2). Our project aims to extend the study of bulimia's relationship to affective disorders by studying twenty bulimic females over two nights of nocturnal polysomnography. We will begin to test the hypothesis that patients diagnosed as bulimic (DSM-III 307.51) (1) will manifest similarly abnormal sleep characteristics as do patients with affective disorders (depressed). Hand-scored EEG sleep records will yield data on the following variables of interest: (a) sleep continuity, (b) sleep architecture and (c) REM sleep indices. (See Appendix B for definitions of these variables). It is hypothesized that bulimics will show similar abnormalities of sleep as do patients with affective disorders (depressed). Concurrently, a secondary purpose of the project is to begin to validate the findings of previous studies that (a) bulimics, like patients with affective disorder (depressed) show elevated blood levels of plasma cortisol on the DST (2), and (b) that bulimics show significant elevations on several subscales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) (3,4). To this end, each subject in our study will be given the DST and the MMPI, and on each of these measures bulimic subjects' performance will be compared to previously established norms. If this pilot study offers promising results, we will undertake a replication so as to yield a larger total subject group. Further studies will investigate the link between sleep and appetite controls in the central nervous system and will test the therapeutic possibilities of affecting appetite by modifying the characteristics of sleep.